RECALLING REBA MAE

Reba Mae on her 50th wedding anniversary

 May is my mother Reba Mae’s month. Her birthday and Mother’s Day are within a few short days of each other. I began writing this on the eve of her birthday. The idea was to publish it on her day, May 16^th. But as often happens with a piece like this, it took a lot more thought and effort than expected, when the idea first popped into my head.

She would have been one hundred two this year. And she would have been aghast. She was already wondering “how she’d gotten so damned old” when she was seventy. In July, it will be twenty-two years since her death. I’ve always wished she had decided to stay a little longer.

It’s not like she was vain, though. I mean regarding the age thing. On the contrary, she was self-conscious, even self-effacing. She thought of herself as “so big and ugly and awkward” and felt that small-boned, petite women like my wife were really fortunate. She said she always felt like “such a big, clumsy, German cow” around them. At social gatherings, which she was loath to attend, she sought to “stay out of the way,” and blend with the wallpaper, unless she could be of use in the kitchen, in which case she would withdraw to that safe haven and remain there for as long as possible.

Her shyness garnered her a reputation—in general but particularly in my father Whitie’s patently verbose family—as “tight-lipped”. As in, “a tight-lipped kraut,” coming as she did from the Weber-Lenninger clan. They were hardy rural folk who were more prone to action than to talk. They knew what they knew and the rest was “none of their damn business.” Despite that fact, if someone managed to coax her out of her self-conscious trance, they would be surprised to find a woman with a fun-loving, even zany bent, somebody highly articulate, with a sharp wit and often even sharper tongue.

Age 18.

Reba Mae was beautiful. I mean that literally. Not because she was my mother. I mean, I’m not being a dutiful son here, not like some guys I’ve known who would say their mother was beautiful even if she looked like Winston Churchill. I’m saying it as  someone who has always been able to deeply appreciate the artistic and aesthetic value of beautiful women. Usually not the ones widely touted as beautiful—certainly not the plastic Barbies—but the ones with a rare natural beauty, with uncommon traits, and the ones whose inner beauty forms an inseparable part of their outer attraction.

She was, I suppose, a clear product of the rural Ohio of her time. A mix of the German and Scots-Irish bloods that prevailed in the state back then, but, according to accounts from her mother’s family, with a dose of Native American blood to temper her European genes. She put her prominent cheekbones, thick, dark hair, and almond-shaped eyes down to that heritage. Those eyes were indescribable. On her driver’s license they figured as “grey”, But that doesn’t begin to describe their color, which I can best depict as “varied”. They changed with the light, and the conditions of the surroundings—sometimes grey, sometimes green, sometimes blue and sometimes almost violet.

Reba Mae and older brother
Gene (right) with Father and
mother (Vern and Myrtle), and 
two younger siblings, Ken and
Marilyn

That Native streak was said to come from Great-Grandpa Job Cavinder’s side of the family. Although proud of it, no one in the family that I know of has ever produced proof of our ties to the Indians, nor is anybody very sure of the tribal origin of our alleged predecessors. But the most plausible story concocted so far has pointed to the possibility that Job’s mother, “Zura” (called that because she hailed from Missouri), who was a Kennedy, may have been the daughter of a Native American mother and an Irish immigrant father.

Whatever the case may be, Reba Mae ascribed to that family theory and said it was the reason for the apparent “Indian traits” in her Aunt Ruth, her Uncle Jesse, her brother Gene, and even her own mix of Teutonic and supposedly Native features. Whatever the case might be, it was a winning combination.

As I say, Reba Mae was of rugged rural stock. Folks on both her father’s side and her mother’s farmed for a living. Her father was a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Germany. As his daughter,  Reba Mae grew up in the rural Ohio of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when there were few frills. Even fewer since she was raised on a series of three tenant farms that her father operated for a major local landholder, also of German descent, Charles Herbst.

Oddly enough—thanks to relatively advanced telecommunications in the two counties (Auglaize and Shelby) where the farms were located—her family always had a phone, but never had electricity or running water until they moved to town when she was a teen. The toilet was “out back”, water came from a well through a handpump in the kitchen, meals were cooked on a wood-burning range, baths were taken in a tub in the kitchen with water heated on the woodstove, and Reba Mae did her homework by the light of a coal oil lamp.

That spartan lifestyle made Reba Mae cringe at any suggestion of things “rustic” throughout her adult life. She coveted modern conveniences and if she was traveling, she wanted good hotels with comfortable beds and proper linen sheets. The word “camping” didn’t form part of her vocabulary. And she found nothing “charming” about the log cabins we stayed in when we vacationed on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she was, of course, the only one who knew how to build a proper fire in the pot-bellied stove.

Despite that, she remained in intimate touch with nature, and made sure that her children developed a deep appreciation of their natural surroundings. She knew the names of every tree, plant and flower, and those of the many birds of rural Ohio, and she knew the traits and habits of a wide range of animals, both wild and domesticated.

Reba Mae (right of the teacher in the second row
from the top), with her class at the one-room
Lennox School in Auglaize County

Reba Mae was a good student and, like her mother, loved to read. She was an assiduous patron of the Auglaize County Library from the time she moved to town, and for her entire life after that. But she also frequently joined book clubs and loved to visit bookstores. In her latter years, she read upwards of fifty books annually.

Before she moved to town and enrolled in Wapakoneta’s Blume High School, she received her education at a series of one-room schoolhouses. These were typically sturdy red-brick buildings about the size of a small family home. Prior to the advent of regular school bus routes, schools went to the children rather than the children traveling to schools. With the proliferation of buses, bigger more centralized schools could be built and rural children could be bused to them. But from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the one-room schoolhouse was the solution for ensuring that rural children received basic, compulsory education.

Back then, there were about two hundred one-room schoolhouses in Auglaize County alone. The idea was for schoolkids to never be more than two miles away from one. Most kids made their way to class hiking cross-country or on horseback. Reba Mae was one of them, depending on the season, either walking with her older brother Gene, or riding her Shetland pony to school.

She loved school, and excelled in her studies. Today it almost seems incredible that anyone could get even a basic education in a school with a single classroom, where one teacher taught six to eight grades. But when Reba Mae entered Blume High School in town, her teachers and fellow students were amazed to find that she had no catching up to do. She was always grateful to the incredible rural schoolteachers she’d had, such as Miss Yvonne Cannon or Miss Jessie Rue Crawford, women who would still be teaching in Wapakoneta City Schools by the time Reba Mae’s own children were in grade school.

Reba Mae got saddled up young with a husband and family. Married at nineteen, her new husband off at war, she took on the task of saving for their future. She waitressed at first, taking a job at Lyman’s Restaurant—which would later become a self-service cafeteria—in downtown Wapakoneta. But she eventually got a better-paying job in the defense industry, working on the line at the Tank Depot in nearby Lima, Ohio, where the M3 Sherman tank, the M5 light tank, and the M26 Pershing tank were all being manufactured for use in World War II’s European Theater. 

It didn’t take long for her bosses to figure out that Reba Mae was smart, industrious and meticulous. And before she knew it they had promoted her to inspector. Very shortly, she was promoted again, this time to line supervisor. All very daunting for an inexperienced young woman who was barely twenty years old when she stopped being a simple line operator.

According to the journal she started keeping in her senior years, the responsibility of the supervisory post got to be too much for her. Especially the part of it that involved giving orders to her peers. Ever shy and self-critical, far from making her feel empowered, ordering her workmates around made her feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. She apparently asked to be put back on the line as a regular assembly worker but her request was refused. She was needed where she was and her bosses had every confidence in her.

So she quit, went home to her parents-in-law’s house, and tried to figure out what her next move would be. She had secretarial and bookkeeping skills. Perhaps she could find a job like that.

But before she even started her job-hunt, her immediate boss from the Tank Depot showed up at her door. She was sorely needed at the plant, he told her. She had to come back. Her country needed her, and so did the boys overseas. Besides, he told her, there was a new assignment waiting for her. He couldn’t tell her about it, except that it would mean more money and a higher position on the organizational chart. She would be briefed if she took the job, but the details were top secret until she decided.

Known as "the duck" this was the secret
amphibious craft Reba Mae was to work on for D-Day

He argued so convincingly that she said she would  take the job under one condition: that it didn’t involve giving orders to others. No, no, he told her. It wasn’t a supervisory job, but a key post in a top-secret project, in an isolated sector of the plant. According to her journal, however, two weeks after taking the post, she was already being placed in charge of specific production teams, something to do with weather-stripping and waterproofing. But it was too late to back out now. Reba Mae’s guiding rule was that, no matter how tough the going got, the worst thing you could be, once you’d made a commitment, was a quitter.

It is noteworthy that, even half a century after the war, Reba Mae refused to write in her journal about what the top secret project had entailed. She had taken an oath, had been sworn to secrecy, and for her, a secret was just that. If you had given your word not to reveal something, you died with whatever it was, and didn’t tell another soul. It didn’t matter that it had already come out in the post-war era that the super-secret project the Tank Depot had been working on was the building of advanced amphibious assault vehicles, specially designed for the D-Day landing. It might not be a secret anymore, but if it wasn’t, it was not Reba Mae who was going around blabbing about it. Loose lips sink ships, as they say. Her code was like that of the Mafia: two people could have a secret…as long as one of them was dead.

Reba Mae with Darla and Dan

From this sort of responsibility as a defense worker at a very tender age, when the war ended, she was out of a job. It was, “Thank you for your service, but the men will take over now.” But she took all of that sense of responsibility and put it into creating a home for her Army veteran husband and the three children that they would produce over the course of the next eight years.

Reba Mae was, obviously, a Taurus. Taurus, the bull. And she lived up to the name with her quiet bull-headedness. She was quietly stubborn and serenely passive-aggressive. And once she had made up her mind about something, there was no veering her off her path. The only one who could manipulate and control her was Whitie. And he did, consistently.

When we were still young enough to get too big for our britches, she was, like a lot of mothers of her time—obviously, she had been brought up that way as well—a great believer in the old adage, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” You always had fair warning, but when she picked up her yardstick, you knew she meant business and it was often too late to “fall on the mercy of the court.”

Our family (Whitie in the rear), Reba
Mae, Jim, Darla and Corky in the middle, 
Dan in the foreground

After a certain age, my older sister Darla had grown too smart to ever merit a whipping. My little brother Jim (Dennis to his friends) was just too cute and simpatico to spank. Eight years younger than Darla and five years younger than I, he was clearly, like a lot of youngest children, her favorite. He was, in fact, everybody’s favorite—a towheaded little guy that was a ringer (in looks and character) for the comic book personality Dennis the Menace, and whom my sister once described as “weighing thirty-five pounds for like four years.” So more often than not, his mischief (of which there was plenty) prompted laughter, while mine (as someone who was anything but cute—equally well-described by Darla as “never a child, always like a little old man”) tended to generate irritation. 

But as I say, at a certain age, when we got too old to cane and old enough to reason, her tactic changed. For me, it was when I grew taller than she was in about a year’s time, and when she once whacked me with the yardstick and it snapped in two. I laughed so hard that it infuriated her, and she grabbed her broom instead. And still, I laughed, so it was obvious I’d outgrown corporeal punishment—unless Whitie decided to dispense it.

I was always respectful (scared spitless) of Whitie’s temper. Darla once said she never was scared “except when he moved really quickly.” That’s a good description, because once Whitie started moving like greased lightning, it was too late to get out of his way. And he remained dangerous like that for most of his life. When he was seventy and I was forty-four, I once said, “Y’know Dad, I must be one of the very few forty-something men who aren’t very sure they could whip their old man of seventy.”

“Oh hell, Dan,” he said, “you’re a helluva lot stronger than I am.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but you’re faster, and you’re meaner.” 

Anyway, from that time on, Reba Mae developed a wonderfully passive-aggressive way of making us do what she wanted us to. Whenever we hinted that we might like to do something that sounded like fun but that could be construed as morally, socially, or ethically questionable, she never prohibited us from doing whatever it was, never yelled, never grounded us. Instead, she would say, “I know I never have to worry about you kids, because I know you’ll always do the right thing.”

But what was the right thing? Was everything that was fun the wrong thing? Ah, there was the rub. If we went to her, it wasn’t for advice, it was for approval. And she knew that, whatever iffy thing we were thinking of doing, we already knew what the right thing to do was.

With Jim, well, it didn’t take. That boy was so full of life, and so free of convention, that he was going to do whatever the hell he was going to do and consequences be damned. In short, he was the healthiest of us all with regard to living life on his own terms as a teen and youth.

But for me, as well as for Darla, that dictum of Reba Mae’s weighed on us like a battleship’s anchor. Our mother was the person we most respected in the world, and knowing that she was expecting us “to always do the right thing,” made every secret adventure either of us chose to realize a source of profound guilt that was almost equal in the balance to whatever fun we derived from it. And that guilt followed us right into adult life, so that, at the backs of our minds, we imagined Reba Mae looking on as we did whatever we were doing.

I’m sure that helped me, at least, to be a somewhat better person, since there was no ethical code higher than Reba Mae’s. But it didn’t help me to be freer, or to live life as it came without regard for the moral consequences of my actions. It put a self-activated bridle on me that reined me in whenever I sought to step out of bounds. It made me a highly responsible person, but played hell with my narcissistic dream of living the artist’s life.

Still, it wasn’t like she was imposing anything on me that she hadn’t imposed on herself. For the decade that I made a living as a professional musician, she used to always say that she just didn’t know where I got my musical talent. “It sure didn’t come from me,” she would say. But that wasn’t true.

The Andrews Sisters

Maybe she didn’t think I was listening when I was a little boy and she told me how much she loved the music of the swing era, and how she’d dreamed of being in a group like the Andrews Sisters, a trio of three saucy chicks singing in the coolest of harmonies. She had a huge collection of 78rpm records with every major swing band and singer of her time. And she indeed had a nice voice and a good ear.

But if she felt like singing along with her records or the radio, she always kept it to a quiet hum and a random lyric, because she was, rightfully, afraid of the derision of her children, or comments from Whitie like, “What the hell are you so happy about?”  To which she would answer, “I don’t know. Just stupid I guess.”

Over the course of the rest of her life, Reba Mae was a mother, restaurant manager, school cafeteria cook, insurance agency secretary, and law firm office manager. She had a good and artistic eye for home décor, and always dreamed of starting an interior decorating business of her own, but it was a dream that was never to come to fruition. It was that enormous amounts of her energy were taken up by a consistent labor of love. Taking care of Whitie.

For more than forty years after returning from that war, Whitie suffered from what was known back then as “manic depression”. Reba Mae was always there to try and rein him in when he hit impossible highs and to attempt to catch him when he fell to abysmal lows. But it was a tough way to live. When a member of the family has severe mental health issues, the whole family suffers from the illness. And that was certainly the case at our house. But it was Reba Mae who lived it every minute of every day.

She followed him through a series of psychiatrists and a series of hospitalizations over the course of decades. It created a kind of symbiosis that they were both powerless to break. It locked them into a small, dark, secret world that only the two of them could comprehend. A world that shut out others including their children. In the end, they came upon a psychiatrist who was willing to call what Whitie had “a chemical imbalance”, and to keep him in a drug-based state of mild but tolerable depression for the rest of his life. By then, the psychiatrist had prescribed a “happy pill” for Reba Mae as well.

Whitie and Reba Mae, sixty years together

When Whitie died at eighty, after a prolonged illness, it was at home, alone with Reba Mae. I’ve often wondered what their last words a to each other were. He had always warned her that she couldn’t die before he did, because he wouldn’t be able to get along without her. His death seemed to release her to finally give in to her fatigue of years and die herself. Shortly before she passed away, six months after my father’s passing,  Reba Mae told me that she wasn’t sure how to go on any longer. She said that she “had been Whitie” for so long that she no longer knew how to find Reba Mae.

After a few months of progressively crueler illness, she was released into my brother Jim’s care at a rest home. Her stay was quite brief. Darla and Jim were with her when she died. All she wanted to do was rest. When Jim, her favorite, her baby boy, tried to talk quietly with her on her death bed, her last words to him were, “Just leave me alone!”

Clearly, she was ready to move on.

She seldom comes to me in dreams anymore. When she does, she’s quiet and aloof. She has nothing to say to me. I moved far away, and she moved on.

I try not to dwell on these things. It seems like such a waste of a smart, creative spirit, and it breaks my heart.

But then I remember the good times. A sunny kitchen where I watched her bake and ice beautiful Christmas cookies. A road trip on which we all played My Father Owns A Grocery Store and ended up laughing until our sides hurt. She and Whitie dressed up in clothes like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to go square-dancing with The Spinning Eights. Her cutting up with the girls at the sandwich and coffee shop she and my father owned together, or joshing good-naturedly with the men who came in to get their morning joe there. My mother and little-boy-me planting a garden together. Reba Mae pruning her roses. Everybody but Whitie working together to redecorate a big, beautiful house we once lived in on the main street in town. Reba Mae teaching me how to pitch a ball. Reba Mae, getting up at the crack of dawn on wintry Sunday mornings to cheerfully take me on my paper route when temperatures were just too low, and the snow just too deep for me to deliver my newspapers on my bike. Reba Mae surreptitiously slipping me her list for the liquor store whenever I was home because it embarrassed her to go in herself. She, Whitie, my wife and I driving down to Tennessee together for a weekend at Opry Land. Reba Mae and I shopping together, lunching together, having pie and coffee together. My mother and I sitting at the kitchen table, a pot of coffee between us, swapping stories about people and events in our small town, she, instilling in me my love of books, my love of storytelling, and my penchant for chronicling the past of personalities the rest of the world had never heard of.

I think about her almost every day. But never more than in May.

FATHER’S DAY

Whitie, you were never what I would call “The Ideal Father”. But then again, hands on our hearts, whose was?  Besides, if the collective evolutionists turn out to be right, I picked you before I reincarnated—if, indeed, I did—so perhaps I have no one to blame but myself.

Whitie

That said, I’ve known of a few who pretty nearly were ideal for their kids—within the margins of human foible—and let me just confess to you that, growing up, I often envied those kids.

Be that as it may, “ideal”, I’ve learned, can have its drawbacks.

I have one friend who, when he talks about his dad, (and no offense, Whitie) he makes you want to crawl up into his ol’ man’s lap and beg him to adopt you. My friend’s dad was a shop worker who busted his ass for his family, but who always had time for his sons, and especially for my friend, who was a rare bird by any standard. But his dad always supported him in every endeavor. If my friend wanted to write, if he wanted to gather the stories of those who couldn’t tell theirs in their own voices, then he should, his dad said, throw himself into it heart and soul. Go after his dream. Not let anybody discourage him. He had a talent, his father said, and by golly, if you were lucky enough to have one, you should flaunt it.

He didn’t tell his son to forget his stupid fantasies about being a writer and learn to do something that would make him rich, or something that would give him a trade, or something with womb to tomb benefits.  In fact, his ol’ man used to do more than encourage him. He used to help his son get interviews when he was still just a sprout, and drive him back and forth, and read what he wrote afterwards, and comment. Once he even told his son that the boy had gone far beyond his own understanding, that his dad no longer understood exactly what the boy was doing, but that whatever it was, he admired his son for it and that the boy should shoot for the stars.

I hear him talk about his father and, you know, Whitie, I get a lump in my throat thinking what I wouldn’t have given for a little, a fraction, of that kind of encouragement and understanding. But like I say, “ideal” sometimes isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And one day my friend’s father went down into the cellar, stuck a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out—in the very house where his sons lived, and where my friend still lives and writes today. I mean, all that had gone before in their almost ideal relationship was shattered in a thunder-clap. How could a boy, by now a man, who had felt so close to his dad compute this? That his father would want so badly to leave the world they shared that he was willing to kill himself to get away?

My friend still has the shotgun. It’s not some morbid “souvenir” of his “ideal” father’s death. On the contrary, the shotgun has become a celebration of life. Every year my friend and his brother take that very shotgun hunting, and after spending a great day afield together, my friend looks out at the great beyond as the sun goes down and says, “See what you’re missing, you sonuvabitch?”

But let’s talk about us, Whitie. I’ll have to say this, that you were never the everyday, ordinary dad. For better or for worse, you were unique. Obsessive-compulsive, manic, bipolar, most of the time at least mildly depressed, irascible and short-fused, ever worried about what might happen in some future that only God knew would exist or not, seldom if ever just living the moment and enjoying life, usually predictable but sometimes, exceptionally, off the charts, unfathomable. But some other times, once in a great while, countable times, happy and hilariously funny....like the time, during one of those lighter moments, when we were playing My Father Owns a Grocery Store and had exhausted every item on the grocer’s shelves so we changed the name of the game to My Father Owns a Drugstore and when somebody said, “My father owns a drugstore and in it he sells something that starts with  ‘s’,” the first words out of your mouth were, “Is it bullet-shaped?” We still laugh about that sometimes!

But then there were the dark, dark times when you’d hole-up in your room for weeks on end or check yourself into a psych ward, where you could hide out even from us, and it was as if nothing but your illness existed—for any of us, but especially for you. You barely recognized us. We barely existed in your world, and if we did, it was only as a burden, a responsibility, added noise and static you’d rather not have had. Especially me, I told myself, because that was what it felt like, as if I were what most vexed you in the entire world.

And then, all of the sudden, right after one of these psychotic episodes, you’d get up and, after a brief period that acted a lot like a hangover but wasn’t, because you never drank when you were depressed and only occasionally, socially, when you were happy (or on a manic high), you could be a completely different person. Especially around others. So much so that my friends would say, “Wow, you’re dad’s so cool. I wish I had a dad like him!” And, although it embarrasses me to tell you this, Whitie, I’d say, “You want him? Take him home with you when you leave. Strictly no return policy.”

You always had such physical grace. I admired that in you, Whitie. A natural sportsman, you were. As a boy, none of that rubbed off on me. If somebody had seen you walking down the street, marching with long strides and sure feet, your Popeye arms pumping, one-two, one-two with each stride, they would never have guessed that you were chronically ill. Nobody could have looked more confident and in control.

Clearly, I was overgrown and clumsy. You told me so yourself on many an occasion. I know it must have embarrassed and disappointed you. It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I learned to overcome that by training my body. Like in anything else, there are naturals like you, Whitie, and those who need to train like crazy, like me. I just wish I’d known that, wish somebody—like you, Whitie—had told me that when I was still a boy, instead of allowing me to believe, before the Army got hold of me, that if you weren’t a natural, you might as well get used to being a washout, a nerd, a benchwarmer. Confidence is so important in becoming athletic, and I didn’t have any. I had to find it and build it myself—with the help of a drill sergeant’s boot up my ass.

It hurt when I was a kid that we never tossed a ball together, that you never taught me everything you knew about sports, that neither did you take any interest in my interests, that we never hunted, or fished, or hiked, or camped together. I remember joining the Scouts, working hard to fit in, to get my merit badges, to be “one of the boys”. Not because I gave a rat’s ass about being a Scout, but because I thought maybe it would make you love me more and maybe take an interest in something I was doing. Mom ended up going with me to buy my uniform, accompanied me—along with widows and divorcees, since the other boys were with their dads—at the Blue and Gold Banquet, was there to cheer me the day I won the Pinewood Derby, while I’m not even sure you knew I was in Scouts. Which I wasn’t for long because, not surprisingly, I lost interest and quit.

And when I decided sports of any kind were a lost cause and excelled in band—head percussionist, student conductor, head of the percussion section in All-Area Band, head percussionist in the Buckeye Scarlet concert band my first and only year at Ohio State—you wrote me off, never came to a game or a concert, never acknowledged my achievements, never said you were proud of me. I didn’t realize it consciously then, but everything I did, even later when I found myself in charge over and over again in whatever activity I undertook, it was to seek your approval, Whitie.

Why was that? Because I always loved you. I still love you.

Still Whitie

But I want you to know, Whitie, that, like I told you in those long-overdue talks we had while the cancer was killing you, there’s nothing pending between us. I’m okay, you’re okay, Whitie. It’s an EST thing. No blame, no regrets. Mostly, I feel bad for you. For how sad and broken you were much of your life. How you couldn’t break far enough out of your personal darkness to see us better. To see me better.

Still, if I seldom managed to make you feel proud of me, there were lots of times I felt proud of you. Like the time on a hot summer day that I took a black friend to your restaurant and soda fountain, the Teddy Bear, for a Coke. The chief of police was sitting drinking coffee at the long table up front, the only other patron in the middle of a slow dog-day afternoon. The same chief who’d held that post for as long as anybody could remember, mainly because he’d been so adept at keeping our all-white town that way. And he made a nasty racist comment, said he hadn’t known you were a nigger-lover, and you told him that if he could get out of there before you got out from behind the counter, it’d save you the trouble of throwing his fat ass out on the street.

My heart burst with pride that day, Whitie.

Or the time later when you were a route salesman, killing yourself working twelve, fourteen, sixteen-hour days on minimum salary and a three percent commission but pulling down the best money you’d ever had in your life, selling several million dollars’ worth of goods a year out of the back of a twelve-ton truck. One afternoon you stopped by the house to pick something up and the company president happened to drive by. That evening he left a note on the windshield of your truck where it was plugged in for the night at the plant. It said he never again wanted to see your truck parked in the driveway of your house at two in the afternoon.

You went inside and marched up to the president’s office. Pushed past his secretary who said that he was “in a meeting” and told her, “Don’t worry, this won’t take long.” You burst in, nodded to the president’s guests, then turned to him, slapped the note down on his desk top and said, “The next time you leave me a little note like this, I’ll personally shove it up your ass.” And then you turned on your heel and walked out, not knowing whether you’d have a job the next day—but you did! And not caring either, because no matter how much money you were making, it wasn’t worth letting yourself be humiliated.

That day too, Whitie, you filled me to bursting with pride. And there were others, lots.

So, I get it that maybe there just wasn’t anything left over from your illness to invest in being “the ideal dad”. I get it. I understand. You were fighting that all your life. You were constantly struggling to overcome a handicap. If you’d been blind, or in a wheelchair, or missing an arm or a leg, I’d have gotten it back then too. But mental disabilities don’t show. People with them just seem to be “acting up” or “not getting their shit together.” Those of us who, right along with the person suffering them, become victims of them always want to say, “What the hell’s wrong with you? Why are you acting this way? Why can’t you just be normal?”

But, Whitie, I get it now. It’s like blaming a paraplegic for not being able to walk, or a deaf person for not being able to hear, or a blind person for not being able to see. You couldn’t reach me, because you couldn’t reach yourself.

But you taught me so much with your example, Whitie. You taught me that you only had your name and your word and that without them you were nothing. You taught me the nobility of work, of not owing anybody anything, of being your own man. You taught me not to back down no matter how scared I was inside. And also with your example, with your suffering, with your constant and losing battle, you taught me about depression, and I learned that you had to get it before it got you, that as soon as it loomed into sight, you needed to confront it, grab it by the throat and shake it, choke it to death, before it had a chance to grab you.

I don’t know if there’s anything beyond this, Whitie. But the day you died, you sent me a message. You know what I’m talking about. So if that was your way of telling me that there is something else, I’m hoping you are really in a better place, Ol’ Man. And wherever you are, Whitie, know that I love you and always did.

Oh, and, happy Father’s Day.

THE RELUCTANT ATHLETE: Part Three

From the age of twelve, work became a big part of my life. I started out, like a lot of boys, with a paper route. My dad, Whitie, thought it would be a good idea.  He felt I needed to man up. The implication was that if I wasn’t going out for any sports, the least I could do was learn how to earn my own spending money, and not just be sitting around the house “with my nose in a book all the time.” It would build character for me to get out and see what earning money entailed, to see that it didn’t grow on trees, that there were no “free rides”.

The first paper route I had was for a morning newspaper, the Dayton Journal Herald. The city of Dayton was over an hour away from Wapakoneta, my home town. And the Journal Herald didn’t have an arrangement, like a number of other Ohio newspapers did, with the local Newsstand—actually not a “stand” at all, but a storefront business—so each morning the Dayton daily’s distributor delivered the local carriers’ bales of papers, hot off the press, to the Post Office across the street from the Newsstand. Although the Post Office counter was closed behind a heavy rolling metal curtain at night, the main hall of the building was open twenty-four/seven, to allow patrons to get to their PO boxes. So it was the perfect place us for paperboys to get together with our papers.

The job entailed getting up at five in the morning, pedaling my bike up to the Post Office, cutting open my bale of papers with a pair of wire-cutters I carried for just that purpose, rolling my papers to a proper throwing size, slipping a rubber band around each one, packing them into my delivery bag, and then making the rounds of my paper route, which started a few blocks north of downtown Wapakoneta and extended almost to my house in the west-side Oakwood Hills addition. I would arrive home in time to wash up, have breakfast and catch the school bus or ride my bike back to town for classes.

Reba Mae, my mother, was less convinced than Whitie that this was such a good idea. She was concerned about my health. The year before, I’d been seriously ill, having caught infectious hepatitis. I’d spent several weeks in bed, so sick I could barely look at food.

Illness was something Whitie and I had shared that year. He was experiencing one of multiple nervous breakdowns that he was to suffer, from the time I was five years old on.  That year, when I was eleven, his manic depression was rampant and he spent weeks on end holed-up at home, mostly in the room he and my mother shared, curtains drawn and sleeping throughout much of the day, while Reba Mae took over for him at our family restaurant, the Teddy Bear, running both his shift there and the house until he got better. So while my older sister and younger brother were off at school and Reba Mae was off at work, it was just Whitie and me there at home, in our new house on Kelley Drive.

For all the company we were to each other, however, my father and I might as well have been each on his own planet, instead of just down the hall from each other in our separate rooms. We were mutual aliens, he trying to purge himself of a crippling inner sadness that seemed to know no cure, and I, biding my time until my young liver turned from a volatile jelly-like state back into a properly functioning organ. One of us only knew the other existed by the creaking of the hall floorboards and the sound of the toilet flushing or the water running. Neither of us was eating much (with the state my liver was in, I mostly subsisted on weak tea and saltine crackers or dry toast) and neither offered to make anything or do anything for the other. In the harsh light of day, we were both painfully thin and pale, my own pallor a ghastly shade of yellow. But we were entities more separate than if we’d been living in a boarding house. If we saw each other at all, it wasn’t until Reba Mae and my sister and brother got home in the evening and my mother prepared supper. And even then our contact was limited since Whitie often refused to come out of his room to eat and, at my sickest, I took my frugal meals in bed.

I remember feeling guilty. I realized how depressing a climate Whitie and I were creating for the rest of the family and how worried my mother must be for both of us. For my part in this silent, blue environment, I was full of remorse.

Still, when I got to feeling a little better, so I could sit up for more than a few minutes at a time, I began to take a strange comfort in this illness, and because I did, I reluctantly began to understand, somewhat, how Whitie must feel holed-up there in his room. Hepatitis had become my shield from the world. The fact that I was so ill meant nobody expected anything from me. I was sick! There was nothing for me to do but stay in bed and get better. Once the early symptoms of the disease were past, however, I was free to do what I did best—read and write—all day long. In fact, it was part of the routine established between my mother and me “to keep me from getting bored.” In addition to bringing me my homework assignments from my fifth-grade teacher, who lived less than half a block from the Teddy Bear, every few days Reba Mae would bring me a new batch of books from the public library, and once I had finished my school work, I would almost obsessively gallop through that outside reading between naps. Then later, I would try my hand for a couple of hours a day at writing stories of my own.

After a couple of weeks of hanging out in my room doing what I loved most in the world, I began to feel safe and unassailable there. Even though I knew it wasn’t normal or healthy, I started developing a feeling that I never wanted to leave that room again. It became my world, my safe harbor, a miniature planet on which, despite my illness, I was in complete control. And through the books my mother brought me, I could live the most exciting adventures in my mind, traveling to exotic destinations without ever changing out of my pajamas. Whitie, I understood, must feel much the same way: safe, unaccountable, unassailable, immune to the demands of others, in complete control of something for a change, even if only of this hundred square-foot space.  

But remorse eventually got the better of me. It became impossible for me the read the sadness in Reba Mae’s face each day when she came back from work to find the house in the same morbid stillness it had been when she’d left and both Whitie and me still barricaded in our separate rooms. Somebody had to break this stay-at-home stand-off and, on the spur of the moment—one afternoon when I went by the kitchen door and saw my mother sitting alone at the dining table crying—I decided it would be me.

As soon as the yellowness had drained from my eyes, I emerged from my room one early-spring day, fully dressed and, donning jacket and cap, declared myself cured and told my mother I was going for a ride on my bike. She was too elated to tell me no, and instead smiled a little dubiously and said, “Well, all right, but don’t go far and don’t over-exert yourself. You’re just getting over something serious and you’re still very weak.”

As it turned out, her warning about “not going far” wouldn’t have been necessary. Within a very few blocks, I had run out of steam and had to laboriously walk my bicycle back home, panting and feeling awful the whole way. When I stumbled in the back door, she looked at me and said, the smile draining from her eyes, “Are you all right? Gosh, your lips are blue!” And with that she rushed me back to bed. So it was that I learned a new word: relapse. And I never could hear the term after that without picturing myself half-walking my bike and half using it as a crutch so as not to collapse, and wondering how I’d ever make it back home.

But perhaps my premature outing served a purpose, because that evening Whitie got up, and that same week he started back to work, and began going to the psychiatrist again. For my part, I spent another few weeks in bed, guilt-ridden the whole while by the fact that I couldn’t have felt more at home there.

So it was little wonder that, the following year, when I was just starting to gain back some of the weight lost and to regain something like an appetite, Reba Mae was less than anxious to see me hopping out of bed at 5 a.m. to ride my bike around in the dark delivering newspapers before school. But Whitie was on a manic high right then, being so assertive that he was hard to recognize. And when he was like that, weakness wasn’t something he easily tolerated. Working would be good for me—get me out of the house, give me a taste of reality.  

At first, I wondered how I would ever remember all of the houses I had to go to each morning. And the first few days, Reba Mae and I did the route together in the car until I learned the streets. She made it fun, almost like a game, and I quickly learned that each house had defining traits to help me remember it: an aluminum initial on a grill over the screen door; a nameplate hanging beneath the yard-light; shingles, stucco or tongue-and-groove siding; a lawn dwarf, a birdhouse, or a metallic-glass ball on a pedestal; a friendly dog; an unfriendly dog; a distinctive weather vane; a certain kind of wind chime on the porch, or any of a number of other distinctive features. In no time at all, I had learned the route and was ready to do it alone —even if, on the foulest of mornings Reba Mae was still apt to say, “Let me take you today. It’s just too awful out for you to do your route on your bicycle!”

Though I wasn’t particularly crazy about having to get up so early, especially as autumn progressed and the mornings turned frigid, and although staying awake in class got to be an issue, Whitie was right about one thing: Making your own money was a game-changer. Suddenly, I not only had new options and increased independence, but also a logical explanation for not doing the things I didn’t want to do, like going out for team sports. Those things were child’s play. In rural Midwestern society, work was serious business that superseded everything else. And a lot of things might be forgiven of a boy who worked compared with one who didn’t.

In the meantime, at school I had joined the band. I was studying percussion and loved it. Being a drummer took a great deal of brain-muscle coordination—precisely what Whitie had always claimed I didn’t possess. But as it turned out, I was quite good at this new coordination-intensive skill. I apparently had a talent for it. Who knew!
That, of course, quickly led to my wanting to also join some kind of pop band outside of school. For that, I needed a set of drums. A friend of my sister’s, who was three years older than I, was selling his old set to buy a new one. He wanted ninety dollars for it. I asked Whitie for the money.

“If I thought you’d stick to it,” my father said, “I probably wouldn’t mind. But how do I know you will? I mean, you’re not very good at sticking to things, are you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Are you?” he repeated. “You know, baseball, basketball, and so forth...”

Still I didn’t respond.

“I just don’t want to put a bunch of money I don’t have into something like this and have the drums just sit around later.”

“They won’t,” I said. “I’m good at this and I really like it.”

“Well, yeah, Danny, but what if tomorrow you quit liking it?” he said. “Then what? I mean, you are kind of a quitter. I mean, be honest. You need to be more responsible. Maybe you should save up and buy the drums yourself. That way you’d appreciate them more.”

With that, he considered the subject closed.

I sulked. Eventually Reba Mae intervened. He wasn’t being fair. Hadn’t they paid for my sister’s trumpet when she joined the band? That was different, Whitie felt, because she stuck to things. She wasn’t a quitter. They eventually reached a compromise: he’d let my mother lend me the money to buy the drum set. But I’d be required to make weekly payments until the loan was paid back.

I grudgingly accepted the loan, determined to prove I was more than good for it. Very shortly, I found a bigger, better afternoon paper route with The Lima News, headquartered in the industrial city of Lima, Ohio, fifteen miles away. Its routes were run out of the back room of The Newsstand, operated by Russ McLean. Mr. McLean was good about letting me browse the racks in his shop before and after I delivered my papers each afternoon, after school. It was there that I started reading Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, as if I were in a lending library. I read “stolen” snatches of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone magazine and Classics Illustrated, as well as of Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other popular adult-audience publications as well. All of which fed my other passion: writing.

As I became aware of how liberating it was not to depend on my father for money, I sought more of both cash and independence. Keeping busy was, I found out, almost as safe a haven as holing up in my room. Who could expect more of an adolescent who kept busy every waking hour either in school or working for his own keep, instead of looking for trouble?

Before long, in addition to the bigger and better paper route, I had also started picking up extra work among my newspaper customers, mowing their lawns, raking their leaves, shoveling their snow, and doing any other odd job they might trust me with, as well as volunteering for kitchen work in our family’s restaurant whenever I had spare time on Saturdays or in the summer.  This allowed me to pay off my drum set in short order.

If Whitie was notoriously stubborn, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree and once the drum set was mine, free and clear, instead of finding the good in the lesson my father had sought to teach me, I tacitly and obstinately vowed to myself never to ask him for anything again and that vow was to form part of the emotional barrier he and I erected between us for a number of years afterward.

The most emblematic symbol of that division would continue to be team sports, which he loved and which I no longer simply avoided, but adamantly opposed. We asked and expected nothing of each other and chose to be strangers from that point on through my high school days.

To be continued

I NEVER REALLY KNEW SGT. WHITIE (PART IV): WHITIE’S PRIVATE WAR

Brothers Red, Chuck, Whitie and Don in the restaurant they opened 

after the war.

There’s an old saying that it isn’t weakness that causes mental breakdowns, but rather, having to be far too strong for far too long.

I vividly recall my father’s first complete mental breakdown. I remember, in fact, the word breakdown on my uncle’s lips and how it scared me. I was five at the time. It was not quite a decade after the war. We had just moved into a new house. Although, the other house had been ours too, my father had bought it from his father. That first house that I recall had been the address on my father’s dog tags throughout the war, the place he had lived as a teen with his parents and three brothers, and where my mother had lived with my father’s family through most of the war, so it was as if this new place were the first house that had ever really been Whitie’s own.

Sadly, however, he never seemed happy there. He had put the down payment on it on a kind of whim while our mother was still in the hospital after giving birth to our little brother. Now we were five, my parents, my older sister, my newborn brother and me, and for some reason, Whitie decided it was time to move.

I think having so many burgeoning responsibilities right away after coming back from the war must have put quite a strain on him, considering what he’d been through and the kind of high-strung guy he was. At any rate, being the second-born, I couldn’t recall a time when he didn’t seem tightly wound. I always figured it was just the way he was. But life back in the old house seemed like better times to me. Like when he would sit in the armchair in front of our big black and white Admiral TV in its maple-wood cabinet watching the Friday Night Fights, sponsored by Gillette Blue Blades, and I would sit on his lap watching with him and eating the spearmint-flavor “greenleaf” jelly candies, marshmallow “circus peanuts” or Brach’s chocolate stars that he handed me one at a time. I still remember what a safe, happy feeling that was to lean back against my dad, who smelled of soap, Skin-Bracer and cigarette smoke, and feel him relaxed and tranquil, as he told me why he liked Joe Lewis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMota, Jersey Joe Wolcott or Archie Moore to win, as if he were talking to someone much older than four and as if the boxers he was talking about had at some time been personal acquaintances of his. I think that memory, that feeling alone is why, to this day I find it soothing and inspiring to watch a good boxing match on TV. It was a sport in which my father saw the training, the poetry in motion, the one on one challenge rather than the savagery that the sport’s detractors always point to and it’s the only sport for which I have inherited his enthusiasm.

At the new house, however, he seemed changed, always nervous, preoccupied and short-tempered, unprepared for the rigors of caring for small children when my mother worked late, so that I now dreaded Friday and Saturday nights when she did so, and was glad whenever she would talk her mother into coming over and lending a hand so that Whitie could just sit quietly in an armchair watching TV and smoking until Mom got home.

And then came the breakdown. As I recall, it was around noon when Whitie’s big brother, Red, brought him home from work at the restaurant that they owned together with their younger brother Chuck. Red had his arm around Whitie, helping him along as if he might fall down if left to his own devices and my father seemed to be sobbing and muttering incoherently. Trying to put on a jovial face as usual, my uncle turned to me with his big red-faced grin, said, “Who’s this guy?” then took his pipe out of his mouth and, pretending it was a six-shooter, squeezed off a couple of rounds in my direction, then blew imaginary gun smoke from the stem, before sticking it back into his mouth.

But then was when he turned to my mother after taking Whitie to the bedroom where he could lie down, and I heard Red say the words “Dr. Berry...complete breakdown...clinic...”  in hushed tones, and saw the frightened look on my mother’s face. She noticed, attempted a strained smile, said, “It’s okay, honey, Daddy just isn’t feeling well,” and added, “Why don’t you go out and play while I talk to Uncle Bob.” I went out, but didn’t play. Instead, I sat on the edge of my sandbox trembling, and worried. There was something serious going on here. Something worth fretting about.

Recurrent Nightmares. What followed for Whitie were decades of what, back then, was called “manic depression”—before the days of more modern and rather more euphemistic terms like “bipolar disorder” or “chemical imbalance” or “post-traumatic stress disorder”. This was often accompanied by a new term that my father’s doctor, a former medical corps lieutenant colonel, introduced and which sounded sinister and ominous: psychosomatic symptoms. These included severe back pain, allergies, acid stomach and chest pains, among other things. We even learned how to use such academic terms in common conversation, as in: “Frickin’ psychosomatic my ass. I’d like that sonuvabitch to have to live with this pain and see how goddamn psychosomatic he thinks it is!”

Reba Mae and Whitie on their 50th anniversary. Decades of manic

depession couldn't separate them. They would share their lives for yet

another ten years.

So it was that we began to watch Whitie like you might a ticking time-bomb, as he would go from soaring highs in which he seemed an unstoppable powerhouse, capable of incredible feats and snap decisions, and in which he became irrepressibly talkative, highly sociable—if extremely volatile—and well-adapted to superhuman work schedules and stunning achievements, followed by headlong plunges into total darkness in which he might hole up in his bedroom with the drapes drawn for weeks or even months on end. In these abysmal states, he refused the help of those who tried to reach out to him, even telling Reba Mae that he was no good, that she should find somebody else, that he didn’t deserve her, that she should just let him die in peace, because a life like this just wasn’t worth living. As his family we “entertained” a miniature parade of well-wishers, who would come to try and “cheer him up”: among these, successive Methodist pastors, who, over the years, would spend part of their house-call evenings sitting in our living room, munching on our popcorn, watching our TV and waiting in vain for our mother to coax the lion from his lair; Red, who would stop by for a cup of coffee and to see if maybe he could get in to give his little brother a pep talk; Whitie’s own father, who would talk a leg off of Reba Mae about Whitie’s condition at a volume that the subject was sure to hear from his bedroom—“I was a-tellin’ Alice that it’s all just his nerves. He was always nervous, even as a kid…”—but all to no avail, since in these states, our father refused to see or talk to anyone. He would draw into himself, almost implode, and nothing and no one could pull him out of his own troubled soul. It would be over when it was over. We would just have to wait.

Psychiatrists followed: doctor’s orders, since Dr. Berry, the ex-colonel and our family doctor, was finally able to convince Whitie that you didn’t have to be crazy to go to a psychiatrist and that if he didn’t go, he’d never get well. But then, getting well, it seemed, was never really in the cards.

He told the first psychiatrist, a Dr. Kalb, that he hated his job. “Then you have to stay at it, confront it, show yourself that you’re up to the challenge,” this psychiatric fundamentalist told him. And Whitie grew furious. He wanted permission to quit, to do something else with his life. He wanted off the hook. But if he wanted to quit, the hardline analyst reasoned, it was because he was sick and needed help seeing that the only way to quit was to meet the challenge, find success and move on to bigger and better things with a strong, light heart. Being a quitter would never help him rebuild his self-esteem. Perhaps what he needed was a bit of stimulation with electric shock treatment. Whitie told him, more or less, to go shock himself. The doctor talked to Reba Mae about his shock theory and she told him the same thing. They talked about Whitie’s childhood and the Doc told him he hated his father. Again Whitie was furious. What kind of textbook bullshit analysis was that, he wanted to know?

That was good, Herr Doktor said. Getting angry was good, even if he transferred it to the doctor (instead of raging at his father as the psychiatrist thought he should). “Go ahead,” Herr Doktor encouraged him. “Get mad! Tell me exactly how you feel!”

“Like wringin’ your goodamn neck, you kike bastard!” Whitie ranted.

Getting mad was one thing, but anti-Semitism was more than the good doctor’s own bruised inner child could take. “Okay, that’s it,” the Doc said, adding in a voice not unlike a baseball umpire’s, “Yer outa here!”

The next one, a Dr. Ciavarelli, was just the opposite.

“You want to quit, quit! It’s your life to lead as you like. You don’t owe anybody anything. You don’t want to go to work, stay home!”

Whitie did…and went to bed for another couple of months. Reba Mae wanted to know what the hell the doctor thought he was doing with advice like that.

Oh, well, that wasn’t at all what he’d meant, the doctor assured her. He’d meant Whitie should do whatever made him happy! But that was just it, nothing made him happy. The man was a prisoner of the deepest kind of depression. Reba Mae got him up, got him dressed, got him back to the doctor’s office. The doctor declared him (again) “manic depressive”, but now added, “with acute suicidal tendencies” and added that Whitie was going to need intensive treatment in a medical facility.

Home Away From Home. By this time, I was about twelve or thirteen. I can’t recall how long Whitie was in the hospital that time. But long enough for me to have accompanied my mother several times to visit him after school or on the weekend. He was staying in a facility in the city of Troy, Ohio, about an hour from home. Reba Mae and I tried to make an outing of it, as if we were just on a lark. We would chat and listen to the car radio and chew Doublemint gum as my mother drove and, depending on what time we set out, either going or coming back, we would make a halfway stop in the town of Sidney, for strawberry pie at The Spot, a traditional family restaurant. If we were on the way there, the pie served as fortification. If we were on the way back, it was comfort food.

It seemed a little silly to need a boost in order to “man up” for the visit. After all, he was her husband, my father. But the man we would meet in the psychiatric ward at the hospital didn’t seem like Whitie, not even like the erratic Whitie who could, at any time, be enthusiastically leaping over the moon or resignedly parachuting into the bowels of hell. This was “Institutionalized Whitie”, living in a safe, orderly, indoor, hospital-green world that, oddly enough, appeared to suit him, so that our overly cheerful presence and upbeat banter clearly seemed more than a little jarring to him. Here, for as long as it lasted, he wasn’t anybody’s husband or father, nobody’s brother or son. And he didn’t seem particularly happy to be reminded that, back in the world, he was. Here he belonged to nothing and to nobody. He was the individual subject of specialized treatment, and was only part of anything in as much as the people who shared this ward with him were all as disturbed, at least, and as broken as he was, so that nobody was accusatorily asking him just what the hell his problem was and why he couldn’t get the hell over it. Here, nobody knew what his or her problem was. It was what they had in common. That’s what they were all here to find out, and if anybody was asking that kind of questions, it was because they were genuinely trying to help him find the answer. In the meantime, it was a kind of ivory tower, in which he obviously felt untouchable. The only pressure was to try and find the answers he was looking for, to try and get well, nothing more.

On one visit, for lack of anything better to do, I asked him to show me his room, since we always met him in a sort of rec room in the middle of the ward where there was TV, reading material, armchairs, sofas and tables for games and activities. So he led me to his room.

“It’s not much,” he said, “but it’s okay.”

It was a basic, utilitarian space that, once the bed had been placed inside, had barely enough room left for a passageway from the door to the window at the other end and for a small built-in locker for personal belongings at the foot of the bunk against the wall. The hospital-green linoleum floor was shiny clean, the matching paint on the walls and ceiling impeccable. This too, somehow seemed to suit Whitie, since he had always been obsessively neat. This tiny room, had that “squared-away” look that he had always prized, with his house-slippers placed just so with their toes under the bunk at one end and his pajamas neatly folded on the pillow at the other, the bedding pulled and tucked so tight that you could bounce a quarter on it.

To me, it looked like a cell, but more like a monk’s cell, I was thinking, than a prisoner’s. Except, that is, for the bars on the window, the silhouettes of which I could see through the neatly pressed translucent curtains. What did they think, I wondered, that he might break out and run amok? Or were the bars so that he wouldn’t climb up onto the windowsill and take a three-storey swan-dive into the parking lot pavement. Both thoughts disturbed me equally and made me eager to get back to the rec room where my mother was waiting.

When we went for the last time to that place to pick him up and take him home, Whitie sat on the edge of his bunk, his gear neatly packed in a small suitcase and waiting on the floor beside him. He looked pale and overtly anxious about whether this was such a good idea. It was as if he were being abducted by strangers and had no idea where we might be taking him. But the doctor assured Reba Mae that Whitie was doing well. That he’d not only made great strides in conquering his own neurosis, but that he had proven a great help to others with similar problems. Among his “peers”, we were told, he had become a leader and had been of fundamental importance in the improvement of several other patients. So much so that the doctor felt Whitie had missed a great calling, that he should have studied to be a mental health worker.

He wouldn’t have had to tell me that. I knew how smart Whitie was, that he could have been anything he set out to be, if he hadn’t also been so mentally and emotionally flawed. But at that age, I didn’t have the words to fully express what I felt—least of all, to Whitie. So as I advanced into adolescence, our relationship was to become a sort of tacit stand-off that occasionally boiled over into open and mutual hostility.

In later life drugs didn't solve the problema but helped him find a sort of

middle ground. Here Whitie, Reba Mae, Dan, Darla and Dennis enjoy a

family reunión.  

Advances and Retreats. After this first brief period of voluntary institutionalization, Whitie no longer holed up in his room when the world closed in on him. Instead, he would call whatever doctor he was seeing at the time for an admission order, pack a bag and head for the nearest psych ward. During the good times, he was more capable than ever of incredible achievements, like during the longest high I ever recall, in which he became a route salesman for a local cheese manufacturer and turned a northwestern Ohio route that hadn’t been able to eke out enough sales to pay for the licensing and insurance of the truck he drove into a company powerhouse that brought in nearly four million dollars a year in revenues.

It was during that period, when my sister and I had already long since left home—she for college and a career, I, to travel, then briefly for college, and finally for a three-year hitch in the US Army—and when our little brother, now a teen, was the only witness still at home, that Whitie met up with a new breed of psychiatrist. This one—a tall, laconic Korean—really couldn’t have cared less, it seemed, what our father had been through in his life, about his childhood, his youth, his job, his marriage or his world. For this one, depression all boiled down to chemistry.  If you could reach high highs and low lows, all that was necessary was to find the middle ground, and you found it with drugs.

Fluoxetine (Prozac) was still a somewhat experimental drug at the time. Psychiatrists were finding out more about its effects by watching what it did to their patients than by reading the laboratory prospectus. And what it did seemed to vary drastically from one patient to the next. Whitie and an old friend, also a veteran, who had been in the Marines during World War II, were both going to the same psychiatrist at the same time, and both were taking fluoxetine. Whitie entered a state of long-term non-manic behavior, a sort of irritable light-gray mood in which he was never content but seldom took to his bed for longer than a day at a time. I missed the highs, but not the lows. In this state at least he and I could sit down and talk without impossible peaks and valleys. His friend and fellow patient, meanwhile, went from bad to worse over the years and eventually killed himself before his seventieth birthday. With Whitie, the panic and depression would, in the end, come back but by then, he would have choices—a stronger dose of drugs and early retirement.

In all those years, I never once heard of anyone’s having asked Whitie about World War II—about his years with the Seventh Army, about the horrors of war—in connection with his treatment. World War II was something you only talked about as a triumph of good over evil. What one had lived through in that war was a duty and a privilege, not a burden. You carried it without complaint and without regret—at least in theory. Anything that was wrong with you mentally was a product of your own failings and weaknesses. And with drugs to remedy it, there was no longer any excuse for “bad behavior”. You fit in or you checked out.

Whitie, still a powerful man a age 70 despite his life-long

struggle with manic depression.

Telling Signs.  Since Whitie’s death a decade ago, there has been a plethora of film documentaries on the subject of World War II, starting with those in remembrance of the sixtieth anniversary of D-day and the end of the war. After the earliest of these came out, I tried to see as many as I could, since in nearly all of them, besides real battlefield footage shot by combat photographers and cameramen, there have been the testimonies by World War II veterans—often from both sides of the conflict. What the American witnesses to that war have, for me, had in common is that I have seen Sergeant Whitie reflected in all of them. In most cases, now octogenarians, they are talking openly about their combat experiences for the first time since the war. They are usually reserved and reticent, yet apparently full of need to unburden themselves of the horror and pain they’ve been carrying in their hearts and in silence for all these decades. Often the point at which they break down during the interviews is when they have to talk about the men they killed, certain that it was either that or die, but also knowing that most of those enemy soldiers were just men like them, with lives, loved ones and dreams like their own, and, like them too, simply victims of the politics of those times. There is no longer any hatred, just remorse and sadness. 

So it is that, in the last ten years, I have begun to wonder just how much the trauma of his years as a combat foot soldier were responsible for my father’s on-going mental illness and his apparent incapacity for happiness or for any deep sense of beauty in life. In fact, as time goes on, I wonder more and more if it wasn’t the war that was entirely to blame for shattering Whitie’s life.

As he grew older there were telling signs on which to base such a theory. When, as a member of the Regular Army, I was assigned to the NATO forces in Europe in 1972, my father, mother and brother came for a short visit. I was stationed in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and they flew into Frankfurt, located a couple of hours away by car. A German acquaintance took my wife and me to the Frankfurt am Main Airport to meet them.  On the way back home, everyone was chatting and joking and just generally being happy to see one another. But Whitie was uncharacteristically silent, watching the landscape as it whizzed by along the Autobahn. Eventually, I touched his shoulder and said, “What’re you thinking, Dad?”

Without hesitation, he said, “I’m thinking I’ve seen this landscape before. I’m thinking I crawled over most of it.” And then later, as he gazed straight ahead at the road, “You know, Dan, they had these superhighways way back then. We couldn’t believe it. There weren’t any Interstates back then. We’d never seen roads like these. We landed cargo planes on them.”

When our father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1999, my brother Dennis moved back to Ohio from Saint Louis, where he had lived for many years, to help our mother care for Whitie. It was at about that time that the 1998 World War II blockbuster, Saving Private Ryan, came out in video. After having seen it in the cinema, Dennis decided to make a gift of the video version to our father, thinking that it was a film that he would surely be interested in, since he had been in service during the war. Since we knew so little about our father’s personal experiences in the war, there was no way for Dennis to gauge how Whitie might react.

If there’s anyone who has never seen the film, it is worth noting that it is a Steven Spielberg masterpiece, with an equally masterful script by Robert Rodat. It has been critically acclaimed for its graphically realistic depiction of some of the worst fighting of the Second World War and of the horror experienced by the men who struggled, died or survived in the midst of it.  The video cassette lay around the house for some time before Reba Mae was finally able to talk Whitie into watching it. Before they ever got through the carnage of the earliest scenes in the picture, however, Whitie shut it off.

“What’s the matter?” Reba Mae asked.

“I can’t watch it,” he said. “It’s way too much like it really was over there.”

Shortly after that, Whitie started obsessively reminding his wife that he wanted her to promise that he would be given no military honors when he died, no color guards, no twenty-one-gun salutes, no military markers or flags on his grave, no VFW speeches, no bugler’s Taps, no piper’s Amazing Grace, nothing to connect him with the young man who had left his innocence on the battlefields of France and Germany.

A last family reunión at our Ohio home several months before Whitie's

death in early 2003.  

Epitaph. The last time I visited my father’s grave back in Ohio a few years ago, when I saw the bronze stake grave marker identifying him as a World War II veteran, I had a fleeting urge to uproot it, toss it into the trunk of my rented car and leave it there, as if forgotten, when I turned the car back in, down in Miami. I know that sounds awful. But then again, I figured it was my fault it was there. Whitie fought the terminal cancer that finally killed him at age 80 for four years. During that time the cost of his medications not covered by health insurance ran into the thousands of dollars a month. I was the one who talked him into getting into contact with the Veterans Administration to see if he couldn’t maybe get some help from them with these onerous expenses. They owed it to him, I reasoned. They had borrowed on his youth, placed him in harm’s way, sent him into the thick of the worst war in history. It was time they paid something back. He could, it turned out, and did get VA help, during the last couple of years of his life. Before that, he had been adamant. He’d just done what he had to do, he said, like everybody else. Nobody owed him anything and he wanted nothing, no recognition, no honors, no fanfare in return. He had spent his entire life practically denying any real part in the war. And now more than ever, he was reluctant to own up.  But, finally, more because I was an Army veteran than because I was his son, he heard what I had to say, responded that he would think about it, and eventually gave in.

I figure that it was because of this new contact with the Veterans Administration that, when he died, we received his record, medals and honors—among them, four bronze stars and a commendation from the French government for his part in the liberation of France from the Nazis—and why that marker that he had never wanted was on his grave. So now, standing there alone in the sharp winter wind on a gray, snowy, Monday morning, that fleeting thought of well-intentioned vandalism flashed through my head. In the end, however, I desisted. Just as soon as I thought of plucking the stake from the frozen ground, I was also assailed by another thought: that no matter what Whitie had said while he was alive, that stake wasn’t mine to remove. Men who struggled in war together as comrades became a family of their own, a family for life and in death, and that bronze stake marker, with the crisp new flag fluttering in its holder, was a symbol that said, the man who lies here forms part of a band of blood brothers. Only we can ever know that part of him, and in that, he’s ours.

For myself, however, I was thinking that I would rather they had honored him in some way other than identifying him with a war he spent his life trying to forget, perhaps with an epitaph that could read: Here lies Sergeant Whitie. He gave his all and asked for nothing in return. All he ever wanted was his life back. Rest in peace.